Vignettes in the Key of Dawn
by Don Sample
Summary: A series of vignettes in the Misunderstandings 'verse, mostly following "To Be or Not To Be."
1. Long Distance

_**Long Distance**_

As missions went, this one was pretty boring, but Lieutenant David Phillips had come to appreciate boring. Boring meant that no one was trying to kill him. He'd take a boring mission over an exciting one, any day of the week.

They were camped out in a jungle on a world that had been abandoned for thousands of years. He and Ry'ac's jobs consisted of making sure that their perimeter was secure and that none of the carnivorous animals on this planet got close to Dr. Summers as she moved from one cuneiform covered stone to another.

Dr. Summers wasn't as oblivious to her surroundings as many of the other scientists that he'd had to cover over the years. He could tell that she was always aware of what was going on around her. She always looked up whenever anyone approached her, and she'd kept her 'second best sword' with her at all times. (He sometimes wondered where she kept her best sword.) Phillips had no doubt that she knew how to use it, even though he hadn't seen her do it yet: he had seen her sister throw down with a sword and an axe one time.*

The day had started out warm and it had gotten hotter as the sun rose over the jungle, and Dr. Summers had shed the outer layers of her clothing. Summers looked better than most of the scientists that he'd had to guard over the years, but he tried not to think about that. Right now, she was part of his team, and as such was completely sexless, just like Colonel Carter (who also looked a lot better than any colonel should) but unlike the Colonel, she wasn't a permanent part of his team. When this mission was over she'd revert to being a girl. He let himself entertain one or two fantasies about asking her out on a date, and where such a date might lead, while never letting down his guard.

Of course, she wasn't like any other girl. Among other things, he'd seen this girl's sister carve up and kill a golem that had withstood everything that the military's premier demon hunting squad had thrown against it. A golem that had been less than a second away from obliterating Phillips before Buffy had shown up. And then there was the whole "Key Thing." Phillips didn't know everything that entailed, and neither did anyone else. Even Summers didn't seem to know what all she could do, but he knew enough to know that it was a good thing that she was on their side.

Best not to think about any of that now. His job was to guard their perimeter. There were some big cats out there in that jungle that would like nothing better than to eat them, and people had been gone long enough from this world that they'd forgotten just how dangerous humans could be.

Dr. Summers was still distracting, though he tried his best not to be. He tried not let his eyes linger on her bare legs and arms, as he swept them over the site. He tried not to be distracted as her bag started to play the opening chords of "Smoke on the Water." Wait a second…

Dawn Summers left the stone she had been clearing vines away from, and went to her bag. She started digging through it, until she came up with a cell phone. She flipped it open.

"Hello?" she said, oblivious to the looks of the other people around her.

"Hey Buffy, I'm kinda busy right now. Is this important?" she asked.

"No, I don't have time to do that now. Why don't you check with Simone in Records?" She looked up and she saw the Colonel, Ry'ac and him all staring at her. "What?" she asked.

"Your phone works here?" asked Colonel Carter.

"I guess," said Dr. Summers. "It's a Willow Special: guaranteed to work anywhere."

"You realize that we're fifteen thousand light years from Earth," said Colonel Carter.

"Hey Buffy," said Dr. Summers into her phone. "Do you know that you just set a record for the longest long distance phone call, ever?" She looked back up at Carter. "What's that in miles?"

"About a hundred quadrillion," said the Colonel.

"A hundred quadrillion miles," said Summers into her phone. "Yeah, that's a really long way. Good thing the phone company isn't billing you for all of them. … I'll have to call you back later." She snapped her phone shut, and looked around. "What?"

"You've just had a telephone conversation over a distance of fifteen thousand light years," said Carter.

"Yeah, I guess that is pretty amazing, if you think about it," said Summers.

"Can you call anyone else with that phone?" asked Carter.

"Sure," said Summers. "As far as the phone company is concerned, this phone is sitting in my apartment back in Colorado Springs."

Carter held out her hand. "May I try it?"

Summers handed over her phone. "Sure. The SGC switchboard is number three on speed-dial."

"Thanks," said Carter, pressing buttons on the phone. She lifted it to her ear. "Hello, this is Colonel Carter. Please put me through to General O'Neill. … Hello General. … Yes, I am still offworld. … I think you need to get in touch with Miss Rosenberg, about buying a bunch of cell phones for us. …"

* * *

*See _The Volunteer,_ Story ID 311877


	2. ZPM

_**ZPM**_

Dawn entered Colonel Carter's lab carrying her report on the inscriptions from P5C-4562. Unfortunately, there didn't seem to be anything useful in it. From her reading of the accounts inscribed in various monuments, the planet had been abandoned because the Goa'uld had never figured out the advantages of such things as crop rotation, and not cutting down every tree in sight. The ensuing soil degradation and erosion had rendered the land unusable for agriculture, and so they had left, moving the population to a different planet that they could abuse. She supposed that they might have planned to come back to P5C-4562, after letting it lie fallow for a few millennia.

There was no sign of Carter. Dawn checked her watch. This was the time that she was supposed to meet her here. She figured that the colonel was running late. She could see her cell phone laid out in pieces on one of the work benches, and felt a bit of annoyance. She'd _told_ Carter that the only thing Willow had done was replace the antenna with one that was magically linked to a crystal back in her apartment, but she had insisted on taking the whole thing. She wondered if she could at least get her SIM card back, so she could get a new phone from Willow with the same number.

There was another bench that had some sort of complex crystal sitting on it. Dawn had seen a lot of Goa'uld and Ancient tech that was crystal based, but this one looked different. Most of the crystals she'd seen had been a single hexagonal prism. This one looked like a couple of dozen such crystals had been stuck together into something almost a foot long, and four inches across. There was something about it that bothered her. At first she didn't know what it was, but she soon recognized the feeling as something that she was sensing as the Key.

It had taken her a little time to come to grips with her new awareness. Most of the time, when she was awake and dealing with other people, she tried to shut out most of what she was sensing of the greater universe around her. When she was alone, meditating, or when her body slept, the Key went out to wander the universe.

But now the Key was directing her attention to the crystal on the bench. There was something … not right … about it. She turned her inner eye toward it, and saw an empty hole in the universe. A space that should have been full of energy, but now was nothing but emptiness. It was a space that needed filling.

She reached out, looking for the power that she needed to fill the crystal. The entire power grid of North America would only give her a fraction of what she needed, so she ignored it, and looked a little farther afield. There was the sun, with nearly all of its energy pouring uselessly into space. If she took some of that power — the part that wasn't raining down onto the Earth and other planets — and channelled it into the crystal, she could refill that space in only a few minutes …

Dawn's attention was brought back to the material world by Colonel Carter's voice: "What are you doing?"

She blinked a couple of times, and focused her eyes on the crystal in her hands, now glowing with a golden light. "Sorry. This was empty, so I filled it."

Colonel Carter took the crystal out of her hands, and looked at it with an expression of wonder on her face. "That shouldn't be possible." She took the crystal over to another of her benches, and hooked it up to one of her machines. She looked at the readouts on its display panel. "That's not possible!"

"What's not possible?" asked Dawn.

Carter ignored her question, and instead went to her phone. She pressed the buttons that put her straight through to General O'Neill. "Jack, you have to come to my lab, right away … Dr. Summers just fully recharged a dead ZPM!"


	3. Atlantis

_**Atlantis**_

_Note: This series diverges from Stargate canon after season 8 of __Stargate SG-1__, and season 1 of __Stargate: Atlantis__._

* * *

"Unscheduled off-world activation!" echoed through the Atlantis control room.

Dr. Elizabeth Weir came out of her office. "Any IDC?"

"It just came in, Ma'am," said the technician monitoring the gate. "It's the SGC."

"It's not Tuesday!" said Doctor Weir. The SGC had gotten access to some new power source that had allowed them to make weekly connections to Atlantis, but for some unspecified reason, it only happened on Tuesdays.

"I know, Ma'am," said the gate tech, "but they're asking for permission to send someone through."

"Lower the shield," ordered Dr. Weir, "and send the invitation."

A few seconds later, four people stepped out of the gate. Elizabeth recognized the three permanent members of SG-2, but the fourth, a young woman in her mid twenties, was new to her. "Colonel Carter, welcome back to Atlantis. What can we do for you?"

"It's more a matter of what we can do for you," said Colonel Carter, looking very pleased with herself. Lieutenant Phillips and Ry'ac were smirking too, and the new girl appeared nervous, while she looked curiously around the gate room. "We have a present for Dr. McKay."

Rodney McKay showed up in the gateroom seconds after Elizabeth paged him. "You rang?" he asked, before seeing Colonel Carter, and her team. "Sam! What are you doing here?"

"Hello, Rodney," said Sam, "We've brought you a present." She gestured toward the new girl. "This is Dr. Summers, with our Linguistics department, and since she's the one who figured it out, we thought we'd let her make the presentation."

"Presentation?" asked Rodney.

"Dr. Summers, if you would?" asked Colonel Carter.

The new girl lifted the case she was carrying, and released the catches that were holding it closed. She opened the lid, revealing the three glowing crystals within.

Rodney was shocked speechless for several seconds. "ZedPMs," he finally managed to blurt out. "Those are ZedPMs!"

"Three fully charged ZPMs," said Colonel Carter.


	4. Linguist!

_**Linguist!**_

This was just _wrong_, thought Rodney McKay. Not only had the SGC figured out some way to recharge dead ZedPMs, but they wouldn't tell him how they did it. All he knew was that the new linguist with SG-2 had something to do with it.

A _linguist_! She wasn't even a real scientist. Linguistics was one of those mushy subjects, where anyone who could string out a semi-coherent line of bullshit could get a degree — even a doctorate — but he knew it wasn't a _real_ doctorate. A linguistics doctorate was only half a step better than the honorary "doctorates" handed out to celebrities who hadn't even graduated from high school.

But here he had _three_ fully charged ZedPMs, and he recognized two of them. His tests showed that they had been completely depleted ZedPMs that Atlantis had shipped back to Earth for study.

That shouldn't be possible. There was no way to recharge a ZedPM, once it had been depleted.

And it was intolerable that the person responsible was a _linguist!_ A linguist that Colonel Carter wouldn't even let him question about how she had done it.


	5. Wraith

_**Wraith**_

Another six Wraith hive ships dropped out of hyperspace, to join the others that were attacking Atlantis. The air outside the city's shield burned from the intensity of the fire raining down upon it, but so far the shield was holding. It would have been a different story if they hadn't received those new ZPMs from the SGC.

But hold was all they could do. The last of the city's drones had destroyed three of the first wave of hive ships that had attacked them, but there were no more left, and the attacking ships were standing back, outside the range of their other weapons. The Wraith were continually dialling into their gate too, so they couldn't use it to evacuate, or call for help.

The attack had been going on for nearly a week, and even the new ZPMs were showing the strain. They were down to 80% of their initial power. They could hold out for another month before they were completely drained, if the Wraith attack continued at the current intensity. Dr. Weir hoped that the Wraith would run out of power for their weapons, before Atlantis lost power for its shield, but the arrival of the Wraith reinforcements didn't bode well for that idea. The only good thing was that it was Tuesday. The SGC always dialled in on Tuesdays. At least they would know that something was wrong when they were unable to connect.

Not that there was anything they could do. Even if they dispatched the _Daedalus_ right away, it would be a couple of weeks before it arrived, and there wasn't much it could accomplish against a dozen hive ships.

Colonel Sheppard's team had been off world when the attack began, but Elizabeth had little hope that they would be able to pull another rabbit out of their hat to save them this time.

Elizabeth was pulled out of her thoughts by Dr. Zelenka yelling: "I'm reading a ZPM power fluctuation!"

No! The ZPMs were the only things keeping them alive! "How bad is it?" she asked.

"It's— It's not bad at all," said Zelenka, with a bemused expression on his face. "ZPM power levels are _rising!_ 85% … 90 … 95 … All three ZPMs are back to 100% power!"

"How could that be?" asked Dr. Weir.

* * *

The Wraith Queen smiled as she watched the atmosphere burn around the Ancient city. She had lost three ships in the initial assault, but it seemed that the Atlantians had nothing left that could strike at long range. Any dart that attempted to approach the city was still destroyed, but she didn't need to use her darts. All she had to do was stand back, and rain fire down upon them. Their shield couldn't hold forever. She was surprised that it had lasted this long.

It had taken her years to build this alliance. Normally the Wraith hives acted independently, but by themselves they were no match for the Atlantian weapons. It was only by acting in concert that they had the strength to destroy the one kernel of resistance against their power that existed in this galaxy. It was only a matter of time before Atlantis fell.

She didn't see the green glow when it first started to grow in her command deck. It came from all around her, growing in intensity so slowly that no one noticed, until it suddenly collapsed into a single brilliant point of light, that quickly faded, leaving a human female behind.

"You have to stop this," she said.

"_Stop?_" asked the Queen. "Why should I stop, when Atlantis is about to fall?" This human female was _nothing_ to her. She had learned her lesson from her sisters, who had kept Atlantians alive when they really should have just sucked the life right out of them, and her hand flashed out into the chest of the woman before her.

She got two surprises from her action: the first was that her hand passed through empty space; the second was a feeling of Power: just a taste, like a drop of water on the tongue of a woman dying of thirst in the desert.

"What are you?" she asked.

"My name is Dawn Summers," said the apparition before her. "What I am …" She shrugged. "I'm still trying to work that out."

"What do you want?"

"I want you to stop," said Dawn.

"_Stop?_ When I am so close to victory?" asked the Queen.

"You aren't anywhere near a victory," said Dawn. "The city's shield will hold against anything that you throw at it. I won't let it fail. It will hold for the next week, month, year, whatever it takes."

"But they are cut off," said the Queen. "Even if their shield holds, they have no way resupplying. Eventually, they will starve."

"No they won't," said Dawn. "You've been doing a pretty good job of coordinating your gate connections, so that as soon as one ends, a new one is ready to take its place, but I can break into the connection any time I want. You can't win."

"If I can't win, why are you here?" asked the Queen. "Why are you even talking to me?"

"Because I don't want to destroy you," said Dawn.

"You're just a hologram!" said the Queen. "How could you destroy _me?_"

"With a thought," said Dawn. "You have one hour to think about it. In one hour, if you haven't stopped, I will destroy you, and any of your ships that are still attacking Atlantis. After that, I will destroy any Wraith who try to cull any other world."

"What kind of demand is that?" asked the Queen. "We have to feed!"

"Do you have to feed on people?" asked Dawn. "I like a nice, medium-rare, steak. It would be damned hypocritical of me to object to you sucking the life force out of a cow, or a pig, or a chicken. If you want to feed off them, be my guest, but I draw the line at anything that you can have a conversation with. People are out of bounds. You try to feed off of them, and I will stop you.

"The Wraith, as they exist now, are nothing but parasites. You take life, but you give nothing in return. You hold back the development of the people of this galaxy. Your existence is tied to that of your hosts. You cannot survive without them, but they don't need you. In fact, they'd be better off without you. As long as you keep feeding off the people of this galaxy, you are nothing but a drain upon it.

"But it doesn't have to be that way," said Dawn. "You're intelligent. You have a lot you could contribute to this galaxy, and the others. You could be a force for good in the universe, if you choose to be. The choice is yours. You have one hour to make it."

* * *

An hour had passed since Zelenka had reported that their ZPMs had somehow spontaneously recharged themselves. An hour in which the fire from the Wraith ships had not abated. And then it stopped. The Wraith hive ships attacking Atlantis all exploded in blossoms of fire.


	6. Zero Sum Game

_**Zero Sum Game**_

Lt. Phillips found Dr. Summers sitting alone in the woods outside the entrance to the NORAD tunnel. She tended to disappear into those woods as often as she could after the siege of Atlantis had been lifted. No one at the SGC had said a word about it, but many of them knew that Dawn had been responsible. Their weekly gate connection to Atlantis had failed to establish, and then Dr. Summers had gone into a trance for a few minutes. When she came out of it, she had nothing to say, and an hour later she completely shut down on herself. They re-established their connection to Atlantis, and learned about the destruction of the attacking Wraith fleet. Dr. Summers said nothing. She just disappeared into herself. She still did her job, efficiently providing translations of archaic texts, but without her normal effervescence.

She had been depressed ever since that day, but she refused to talk about it. Every so often, she'd get even more depressed, and disappear for an hour or two. Reports from Pegasus indicated that her bouts of depression corresponded with the destruction of more Wraith hives.

"It's not your fault," said Lt Phillips.

"It isn't?" asked Dawn. "Then whose fault is it?"

"The Wraith's," said Phillips. "They started this. They're the ones who can stop this."

"But they won't stop," said Dawn.

"That's their lookout," said Phillips.

"It's so stupid," said Dawn. "It shouldn't be this way."

"We have to live in the world we have, not the one we think it should be."

"What if you have the power to reshape the world?" asked Dawn. "What if you *can* make it the way you think it should be?"

"Hmm?" asked Phillips.

"I can exterminate the Wraith," said Dawn. "I can kill every vampire and demon on this planet. I know about a guy who's beating his wife in the apartment building I'm living in.

"I've reported him to the cops, but his wife refuses to press charges. What should I do about that? I can hurt him. I can make him drop dead, I can turn him into a bloody smear on the street, or I can just make him disappear. I have the power to destroy anyone I want to destroy. Destruction is easy. Creation is hard. How do I create in her the will to stand up for herself?"

"I don't know," said Phillips. "Maybe you just have to give her the opportunity to find that inside herself."

"But what if it's not there?" asked Dawn. "I can't make that sort of thing appear overnight. She is what she is. I can't change that."

"Can't you?" asked Phillips.

"Not without changing who she is," said Dawn, "and if I did that, would I be any better than him? Sure, she wouldn't suffer the pain, but I'd still be changing her against her will. I'd be destroying who she is, to make someone more to my liking."

"You don't want to play God," said Phillips.

Dawn grimaced. "Been there. Done that."

Phillips was more disturbed by that than he wanted to admit. "What do you mean?"

"I've been a God," said Dawn. "I've found the seeds of life on a world, and watched their growth. I've planted seeds on other worlds, and nurtured them. I have created life capable of contemplating the cosmos, and wondering if it had a creator. I have been worshiped."

"And what did you do?" asked Phillips.

"I never even noticed it," said Dawn. "It's only in retrospect, after living a life as a human, that I can recognize it for what it was. If the orchids in a greenhouse started to worship their gardener, would she ever become aware of it? Would she choose to breed a flower that paid her homage, over a flower that showed a new colour that she'd never seen before? I'd choose the new colour. I nurtured diversity. I didn't care if I was worshiped. I never even noticed. I was tending a garden. The Universe is a beautiful garden. I was trying to make it better."

"All gardens have weeds," said Phillips, "and sometimes you need to prune."

"A weed is just some plant growing where you don't want it," said Dawn. "To a wheat farmer, a rose bush in the middle of his wheat field, is a weed, but I was never that sort of gardener. I think maybe I was more of a park ranger: trying to keep a diverse ecosystem running, with minimal interference. Beauty wasn't in things growing the way I wanted them to: it was in the surprising things I'd find, that I never expected."

"And the Wraith?" asked Phillips.

"They are a blight," said Dawn. "A fungus living off the tissue of the humans in the Pegasus Galaxy."

"So they need to be exterminated."

"Not exterminated," said Dawn. "But they do need to be…pruned, and we really need to stop switching back and forth between our metaphors. The Wraith can't be allowed to swell their population any further. There are already too many of them in Pegasus: if they're allowed to grow even more numerous, it will be a catastrophe, not just for Humanity, but for the Wraith. The Wraith need people to survive. If Humanity goes extinct, so do the Wraith. If they make it through to this galaxy it will open a whole new feeding ground for them, allowing an explosive growth in their population, followed by a corresponding crash. In the long term, it won't be good for either of us."

"Us?" asked Phillips.

Dawn shrugged. "Dawn Summers might be a small part of what I am, but I do think of her as the most important part. I chose to return myself to this form. I still think of myself as human…The Key has vast knowledge and power, but Dawn has more intelligence. I want the universe to go on with Humanity taking a big part in it." Dawn shrugged. "I'm prejudiced that way."

"And the Wraith?" asked Phillips.

"They have their part to play too," said Dawn. "If there's one thing I've learned over the last few billion years: Life isn't a zero sum game."

"What do you mean?"

"You know about zero sum games, don't you?"

"A game were there's a loser for every winner."

"Yeah, but not all games work that way," said Dawn. "Some games can have multiple winners. If everyone plays the game right, they can all win. Trying to be the only winner will mess things up for everyone. In the long run, anyone who tries to do that won't just eliminate their competition, they'll eliminate themselves as well. The true winners are the ones who find a way for *everyone* to win.

"If the Wraith want to thrive, we have to thrive as well. We have to come to an accommodation of some sort."

"And if we can't?" asked Phillips.

"If it comes down to them, or us, I'll choose us," said Dawn, "but then, will I be any better than them?"

"You've already given them more consideration, in this conversation, than I've ever heard of them giving us."

"So, you're saying I could be worse?"

"No, I'm saying you're better," said Phillips. He smiled at her. "You aren't playing one against the other. You're trying to find a way for both of us to thrive."

"I don't know if I can," said Dawn.

"And yet, you try," said Phillips. "That puts you head and shoulders above most of the creatures I've met who call themselves gods."

"I'm not a god," said Dawn, "I'm just me."

"And that's what sets you above all those other poseurs," said David. "You're just yourself." He leaned forward and kissed her.

Dawn was surprised for a moment, not knowing how to react, but after a second, she started to kiss him back. She lost herself in the Kiss. She had billions of years of memories, but they were memories of being alone. She had kissed other people, but they had only been kissing Dawn. Some of them had only been kissing a girl, hoping that the kiss would lead to sex, and procreation, as a billion years of evolution had programmed into them. David was the first person who had ever kissed Dawn, and the Key, knowing that they were kissing both. Dawn lost herself in the moment, kissing David back.


End file.
